Dealing With Fertility Disappointment
One of the hardest things about this journey is the repeated monthly fertility disappointment of seeing your period arrive when all you want to see is a positive pregnancy test.
When things don’t go the way you had envisioned, you may feel a range of emotions from slightly let down to depressed or even angry. On a fertility journey, this feeling can build and build and build until it feels unbearable. You might direct your feelings inward toward yourself, or outward toward other people or the universe in general. Disappointment is always a harsh feeling to experience. It is important to remember, though that it is a natural part of life, and there are many ways of dealing with it when you find yourself in its presence.
As with any feeling, fertility disappointment has come to us for a reason, and you don’t need to fear acknowledging it or feeling it. The more you can accept how you are feeling and process it, the sooner you will move into new emotional territory. As you sit down to allow yourself to feel the disappointment, you might want to write about the experience of being disappointed; this process is a simple but effective way to release negative feelings. The gift of disappointment is its ability to align us with reality so that we don’t get stuck for too long in the realm of how things might have been.
As you consider other disappointments in your life and how you have moved past them, you may even see that in some cases what happened was better in the long run than what you had wanted to happen. Disappointment often leaves us feeling deflated with its message that things don’t always turn out the way you want. The beauty of disappointment, though, is that it provides us with a bridge to its other side where the acceptance of reality, wisdom, and the energy to begin again can be found.